BYD Dolphin Surf First Drive: Is China’s Best-Selling Car Any Good?

Take a look through the best-selling cars in the UK market, and you’ll see a list dominated by petrol-powered crossovers. Cars like the Kia Sportage, Nissan Qashqai and Ford Puma top our charts.

EVs have begun to break the top 10 on occasion – the Tesla Model 3 notably making a few appearances on SMMT’s official data after the odd flurry of registrations – but have yet to really gain a real strangle on the mainstream.

For some context, of 150,070 new car registrations in May 2025, 32,728 of those were battery-electric vehicles – about 22 per cent of the market. That figure has been gently increasing year-on-year, but it hasn’t exactly surged.

That’ll surely change someday, but for now, there are many things we can pin that on – the upfront cost, a still iffy public charging network and a general disdain for seemingly being pushed towards electrification by government regulation rather than EVs offering themselves as a widespread compelling alternative.

BYD Dolphin Surf, rear

It’s a contrast with the market in China. May saw its year-on-year BEV registrations rise by around 55 per cent, and that figure only continues to grow as domestic manufacturers flood its dealers with low-cost, home-built EVs.

Since its introduction in 2023, the BYD Seagull has found itself vying for the coveted title of China’s best-selling car on multiple occasions. Not best-selling EV – best-selling car outright. In fact, in May, it was only pipped by a fierce new rival in the Geely Xingyuan. Depending on which figures you trust most, the BYD Seagull has a claim to the best-selling car in China for multiple months since its introduction.

Now, it’s finding its way to Europe and the UK. Not as the Seagull as we hate those flying rats here on our shores, but as the BYD Dolphin Surf. The question is, though, is China’s best-seller actually any good?

That’s a question we’ll cop out on for now and say we can’t answer here with assured conviction at this point. We’ve been behind the wheel, but at an event held in North London geared towards influencers taking selfies with a robot for social media clout (No, seriously, search #byddolphinsurf on any of your preferred platforms and enjoy some of that circus…), rather than catering to a genuine assessment of the car.

Reviewing a car after 12 miles of driving done in the space of an hour in a congested capital doesn’t sit right with us. It doesn’t feel fair to you, who may be looking to drop £18,650 on a shiny new electric car, nor fair to the BYD Dolphin Surf. Instead, we’re treating this as a first taste – hopefully followed by a main course of proper road testing in the future.

For the time being, though, we can tell you that £18,650 puts it at a compelling point in the market. Sure, it’s not the cheapest EV on the market – the Dacia Spring undercuts it by around £4000, the Leapmotor T03 by £3000 and right in the mix with the Citroen e-C3 and EV versions of the Fiat Grande Panda. A Hyundai Inster is more still, and we’ll have a full review of that in the coming weeks, but rest assured that’s cool enough to justify a higher price tag.

Unlike the Spring and T03, though, the BYD isn’t trading on being cheap. There’s a serious effort to make a car that looks good, which we think has translated into a pretty cool and unique-looking little thing, and feels good.

Interior build quality is above what we expected. Fit and finish is generally pretty impressive across the board, albeit you do have to contend with the usual dollop of hard plastics scattered about, as with any city car at this price point.

There’s a lot of tech, too. Adaptive cruise control comes as standard (something you won’t even find on most Porsches), and that system generally works pretty well from our brief testing. You’ll have to contend with the over-intrusive ADAS tech that often plagues Chinese cars, though, often mistaking me chatting with co-driver and former Car Throttle Editor Matt Robinson for yawning, prompting an obscene amount of fatigue warning beeping.

You can switch most of that stuff off, but it requires a lot of distracted fiddling through the screen, which feels like defeating the purpose of having it in the first place.

Ah, the screen. The base software is pretty responsive, but congested with buttons and information you really don’t need. For example, an angle sensor is evident but doesn’t seem to tell you what for… and while it has the usual BYD gimmick of being able to rotate from horizontal to portrait at the push of a button, you can’t have it upright when using Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Yet, the on-screen prompt for it remains on display when using either of those.

Rear seat space is about as tight as everything else on this end of the market, which is to say you won’t want to carry your tall mates in the back too often unless you enjoy knees digging into your back, but it’s far from a Dolphin Surf-unique problem. Although only being able to carry two passengers in the back might be enough for some to immediately rule it out. Boot space is respectable at 308 litres, about par for the course among its rivals.

So far, so good. What about the technical bits?

Well, the top-spec Dolphin Surf Comfort we drove (with its price rising to a punchier £23,950) is quoted at returning up to 200 miles of range from its 43.2kWh battery pack. Averaging about 20mph from London over a short drive seems pretty faithful to that, with it returning 5.2mi/kWh, but a comment on that will have to wait until we see how far that drops given some higher-speed driving.

As too will any concrete verdicts on the driving experience. Our initial thoughts are pretty mixed – it rides pretty well over low-speed bumps, and scooting around tight corners is no surprise, easy. Yet wind and road noise became pretty evident in one 50mph A1 stretch, and we’re a bit disappointed with how slow the electric motor is to respond when trying to get out of junctions.

The answer to ‘Is China’s best-selling car any good?’ will have to wait for another day. Our initial feeling is in the ways that matter to most people – does it look cool, is it well priced, and is there a lot of kit? Yes, it probably is. In the way that matters to anyone who cares about driving? Less convinced at this stage. And then there’s the big elephant in the room – a top-spec one goes toe-to-toe with the utterly sublime Renault 5.